Fort Pitt, Kent
Fort Pitt is a Napoleonic era fort on the high ground of the boundary between Chatham and Rochester, Kent.
A fortification on the site was proposed as early as October 1779 by Hugh Debbieg, then Chief Engineer at Chatham. During April 1783 the land was purchased by the Board of Ordnance and 4.5 million bricks were deposited there in preparation for construction of Fort Pitt..
Fort Pitt was finally built between June 1805 and April 1819. At that point, the Napoleonic Wars having ended, it ceased being manned as a defensive installation and instead became an important military hospital. From March 1824 to February 1857 it was the only General Military Hospital, as opposed to Regimental Military Hospital, in England, and, until the opening of Netley Hospital in 1863, it was considered the de facto Headquarters of the Army Medical Department. Fort Pitt Hospital closed in the 1920s, since then the surviving buildings have housed a girls' grammar school.
History
The original hospital
In February 1793 Chatham was one of five sites selected by the new Army Medical Board for the establishment of a General Hospital;. Towards the end of the century an establishment of medical personnel was appointed and work was begun on the medical building. The intention had been that the General Hospital would function as part of the 'Depôt of Recruits and Invalids' which had been established at Chatham during October 1772. In June 1801, however, the Depôt of Recruits and Invalids was removed to Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight in Hampshire. The established Depôt Hospital went with it; so when the medical building was finally completed by December 1801, it found itself without a function. Two years later, at the start of the Napoleonic Wars, the hospital was finally opened in an attempt to re-establish a General Hospital for the British Army at Chatham; but it did not prove successful. Over the next year or so, the General Hospital was gradually run down and it closed in April 1805; later that same year the building was turned over to barrack accommodation, and Fort Pitt was constructed around it.The Fort
Construction of Fort Pitt on the site began during June 1806, in response to renewed fears of a French invasion. Named after Prime Minister William Pitt, Fort Pitt was planned as part of the defensives overlooking the River Medway: Fort Clarence, Fort Amherst and the Great Lines were visible from Fort Pitt, the whole providing a defensive ring to protect Chatham Dockyard from landward attack. A further concern was to guard the approaches to Rochester Bridge, which was a key riverine crossing on the most direct route from the south-east coast to London.By April 1813 the construction of Fort Pitt was more or less complete. It has been described as a 'remarkable hybrid': it was among the very last bastioned forts to be built in the United Kingdom, but integrated into its form were multi-storey brick gun towers, representing the latest style in fortification.
Description
Fort Pitt was laid out as an irregular polygon with a bastion at each corner. Formed of a combination of red-brick walls and earthworks, Fort Pitt was surrounded by a deep defensive trench, beyond which was a substantial glacis. A ravelin was built across the ditch to the south ; within the walls at this point were a pair of cavaliers. Placed off-centre in the middle of Fort Pitt was a substantial tower or keep : three storeys high with a gun platform on its flat roof. In line with the tower to the north, projecting out from Fort Pitt like a hornwork, was a detached blockhouse containing casemated barracks with accommodation for up to 500 soldiers. This also functioned as a multi-tiered gun platform, and had a flat roof for gun emplacements. The blockhouse was outside Fort Pitt but attached to it, so as to allow the occupants to withdraw into the building in the event of an attack; it was built on a massive scale, cut into the hillside and flanked by dry moats revetted with bricks. It dominated views of Fort Pitt from Chatham and the north.Two outlying towers were also built, one on each flank, named 'Delce' and 'Gibraltar'; 'Delce' was linked to the fort by a covered way. Each were brick towers, two storeys high with magazines and stores at basement level. Built with musketry loopholes and equipped with a pair of 18-pound carronades, they were designed to control road access to the bridge: Delce to the west defended the approach from the south, Gibraltar to the east defended the approach from Chatham.
Armament
Until March 1826 Fort Pitt was armed with ten 18-pound cannons, twenty-two 18-pound carronades and four 10-pound mortars.Its function was described in 1822 as follows:
'Fort Pitt, scarped with masonry and bastioned is the largest of all the works which cover Chatham, and the nearest to the citadel, the fire of which crosses its own. On the opposite quarter, the fire of Fort Pitt crosses that of Fort Clarence The flanks of Fort Pitt are provided with carronades in frames turning upon pivots to sweep the different parts of the ditch. The gorge of the fort presents a front of fortification, casemated with embrasures, to command in reverse the town of Chatham, and the course of the Medway'.
According to the same description the central tower of Fort Pitt was described as being
'armed at the summit with two long guns to batter in front, and two carronades to protect the gorge. This was at the epoch when the rage for building martello towers had seized the British government The tower in Fort Pitt is very lofty, and its object is to command at a considerable distance the brow of a hill which raises itself with an insensible slope in front of Fort Pitt'.
Invalid Depôt and General Military Hospital
The end of the Napoleonic Wars meant that the site was not finally used as a defensive installation, and by September 1814 the soldiers garrisoning Fort Pitt were redeployed. For a brief time it was occupied by the Royal Marine Artillery, due to shortage of accommodation elsewhere, but in April 1815 they were removed to make way for wounded from the Battle of Waterloo.By December 1819 the Invalid Depôt of British Army was moved back from the Isle of Wight to Chatham, and Fort Pitt was repurposed as a medical establishment to treat soldiers prior to their release from military service. At the same time, the nearby Fort Clarence was converted into a lunatic asylum for personnel from the British Army and Royal Navy.
In the same year, York Hospital, Chelsea was closed to serving soldiers, and Fort Pitt began to be established as Britain's principal military hospital. In 1822 the casemates were said to be 'at present inhabited by invalids, who compose the only garrison of this fortress'.
The building was expanded from October 1823 to March 1824, with eight large wards of twenty-seven beds each providing room for over 200 patients. The H-Plan Hospital building was flanked by smaller blocks to the north and to the south, which served as the quarters for the Medical Officers.
Fort Pitt also functioned as the Medical Staff Depôt: 'all candidates for commissions, and young Medical Officers who had just received commissions, were in the first instance sent down to Fort Pitt; partly in order that, when the exigences of the Public Service Permitted, they might receive a certain amount of training in the special work as Army Surgeons, and partly also because the Staff Depôt formed a convenient place of residence for them until they could be drafted to their respective destinations'. In 1816 the Director General of the Army Medical Department, James McGrigor, had brought from Chelsea a collection of anatomical specimens and other items of interest with a view to establishing a Museum of Military Medicine at Fort Pitt. At the same time he endowed a library on the site, and issued instructions to the Medical Officers of the British Army stationed around the globe to send six-monthly reports of prevalent diseases, treatments and various treatments which were collated at Fort Pitt and made available for analysis and study. The museum and library expanded prodigiously over the years and Fort Pitt became an important centre for the study of military and tropical medicine.
In 1846 the lunatic asylum for the British Army was moved out of Fort Clarence ; the following year a smaller "asylum for insane soldiers" was opened in the north-west corner of Fort Pitt, in a former barrack block,.
From March 1854 and onward Fort Pitt had become an important General Military Hospital, with most of the soldiers invalided to Britain from abroad assessed there prior to their discharge. This included most of the sick and wounded from the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny Florence Nightingale described, at that time, the process whereby 'When a ship arrives with invalids, the bedridden are carried to Fort Pitt, and the convalescents are marched to St Mary's Casemates'. During the period of the Crimean War a total of 14,700 soldiers passed through the Central Invalid Depôt of the British Army at Chatham.
At some stage the blockhouse at Fort Pitt had been converted into a 'Casemate Hospital' with five casemated wards. During November 1842 to June 1859 two of the casemates were appropriated for the sick women and children of the garrison, for whom it was the only healthcare site provision available; in the year ending March 1857, 26 sick women, 12 sick children and 20 lying-in women were treated there. In 1854 psychiatric patients were returned to Fort Pitt from Yarmouth and housed temporarily 'in the "Pit" or Casemates', a place described as being 'most unfit': 'even the temporary confinement of a lunatic, in a place so destitute of the means of ameliorating his mental condition, must materially lessen the chance of his recovery'.
In January 1860 Fort Pitt was selected by Florence Nightingale as the initial site for the new Army Medical School; however, this was only a temporary measure pending the imminent opening of a new General Military Hospital at Netley, near Southampton, which took place in 1863. Along with the Army Medical School, the museum and library were moved to Netley in 1863 and the following year the Invalid Depôt was removed from Chatham to Netley, prompting a reassessment of the function and use of Fort Pitt.
Garrison Hospital
The Army Sanitary Commissioners had in February 1863 approved a proposal for the facilities at Fort Pitt to be converted into 'a Hospital for the whole of the troops of the garrison, including the Royal Artillery, the Royal Engineers, and the three depots battalions of infantry'. The following year additional buildings were erected 'for the reception of the whole of the troops of the garrison requiring hospital treatment'; at the same time, the old separate Garrison Hospital within the lines at Brompton was closed and its premises converted into barracks.A major expansion of the General Military Hospital at Fort Pitt was begun in September 1910, necessitating the demolition of the West Wings of the old H-Plan hospital and also the removal of the Napoleonic-era tower-keep, to make way for a new central hospital block. This Pavilion-Plan hospital extension opened just before the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914.
In October 1914 King George V and Queen Mary visited, meeting Servicemen wounded in the First World War, including five German Naval Officers held in a separate ward. At least seventy German prisoners were treated at Fort Pitt. On recovery, they were held in the Blockhouse until the end of the World War 2.
The General Military Hospital closed in August 1922; its patients were transferred to the Royal Naval Hospital, Chatham.
Grammar School
In September 1929 the Chatham Education Board bought the vacant Fort Pitt from the War Office, and the site was converted into a Girls' Technical School. The school, now known as Fort Pitt Grammar School, remains on the site and has added a number of new buildings. The neighbouring University for the Creative Arts building occupies the old blockhouse site and some of the original brickwork remains visible at the sides of the building.Present day
The site of Fort Pitt continues to be of historical significance for the United Kingdom and substantial sections of the ramparts are still clearly discernible. Several original buildings of Fort Pitt have not survived above ground level: Gibraltar Tower was demolished in October 1879 and Delce Tower, by then a ruin, was demolished in January 1880. The Central Tower, or Keep, was removed in April 1910 when the General Military Hospital was extended; and the blockhouse was demolished in November 1932, to allow the school to expand. Nevertheless, much of the outer walls of Fort Pitt survive including parts of the outer defences which extend into the adjacent recreation grounds to the east and west. The tunnels of the fort also survive, but are partly filled in. The remnant blockhouse of Fort Pitt was built over when the Medway College of Design was constructed by August 1970. It became the Kent Institute of Art & Design in September 1987 and a campus for the University for the Creative Arts in September 2005. it is believed that the basement of the Medway College of Design is haunted. Sounds have been heard coming from the brick-lined tunnels of Fort Pitt that were discovered there, since the Medway College of Design opened in September 1970.Furthermore, several of the Fort Pitt Hospital buildings remain in place as part of the school. The Music House in the school grounds and the “Crimea Wing” teaching block are both listed buildings, with some of the ward numbers of Fort Pitt Hospital still visible on the Crimea Wing's walls. Several other buildings also date to the period of use as a General Military Hospital, including the North Block and the West Wing of the 1914 extension.